Shelley Fralic: No women in boardrooms? Maybe there’s a good reason

Face it: it’s still a man’s world out there in the working world, pretty much everywhere you look as long as it’s not retail and as long as it’s not child care and as long as it’s not any other vocation that men typically avoid like the proverbial plague because it’s a) not manly or b) doesn’t pay enough or c) lacks opportunity to take over the world.

Whether you read the endless lists of most powerful leaders, or browse the names in the average annual report or you simply look around you, at who’s managing your local Safeway, at who is sitting in the corner office where you work, at the names on schools and public buildings and bridges and rivers in your community, the evidence is incontrovertible.

Patriarchy is alive and well. Men rule. Women not so much.

It was ever thus, of course, but the topic of gender inequity, especially in the workforce and especially in corporate boardrooms and especially around the impenetrable threshold known as the glass ceiling, remains a hot button, despite years of feminist inculcation, despite daughters and sons being raised by a generation of working mothers, despite every effort by society to make the imbalance on the shop floor and in the corner offices less so.

Recent evidence that the more things change, the more they stay the same, comes courtesy of a Conference Board of Canada analysis released earlier this month. It found that when asked the question, 90 per cent of the women surveyed said, yes, there is a need for companies to increase the number of women in senior management, not just to balance the yin with the yang but to bring a different kind of management style to the table. It also found that 42 per cent of the men surveyed — less than half — agreed.

On the heels on that unsurprising result, my colleague Don Cayo reported more bad news: local research by the Minerva Foundation of B.C. indicates only 19.5 per cent of all business leaders in this province are women. And in some areas, such as mining, Crown corporations, finance and technology, the figure is less than 10 per cent.

And so it goes, the endless research and interminable hand-wringing over the unmoving goalposts. So goes, too, the continuation of well-meaning advisory boards and distaff succession planning and corporate tone-setting. We initiate mentoring programs and stage mandatory sensitivity sessions and hire women-in-leadership experts to tame the dominant Y chromosome in our workplaces. We seek the guidance of psychologists and social anthropologists, corporate headhunters and statisticians, women’s networking groups and affirmative action proponents, and still the sands seem barely to shift.

The gender gap, especially in the corporate world, is a chasm and there are no signs the boys’ club is opening its doors wider any time soon.

Maybe, just maybe, there’s a more organic explanation for the snail’s pace of workplace gender equity, the kind of old-school rationale that we seem loathe to admit, at least in mixed company, because it goes against the grain of every aspiration that modern women, and indeed modern society, have been taught to embrace.

Maybe it’s simply that more and more women — packing degrees and experience and big IQs and serious management skills — have found their way to the glass ceiling and, having looked through it, don’t much like the view.

Maybe they don’t relish a 12-hour day in an environment where sports and politics are conversation staples, where deals are done on golf courses, where women in high-powered meetings are usually expected to take notes and where, when your career is done, your children remember only your absences.

Maybe they don’t want to work all day and then go home to the second job, the cleaning of the toilets and the making of the school lunches and the schlepping of the kids to piano lessons and doctors’ appointments, that being the second (unpaid) job that most male executives contract out.

Maybe the hopes and dreams of women are less about winning wars in the boardroom — and make no mistake, the boardroom is like Battleship but with suits — and more about keeping the peace on the home front. (Anyone surprised by that other back-to-the-future phenomenon, highlighted by a survey released this week that found 76 per cent of Canadians think a child under six should be at home with a parent and not in a daycare?)

Maybe it’s the reason that entrepreneurship — small businesses, especially — are increasingly the domain of women, especially new mothers.

Maybe when it comes to having to opt between climbing the corporate ladder or focusing on family life — and, no you can’t do both well, no matter what anyone tells you, and yes, it’s a choice that men seldom have to make — we are just a lot smarter about what waits on the other side of that infamous glass ceiling.

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Shelley Fralic: No women in boardrooms? Maybe there’s a good reason

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